By way of Introduction

Some weeks ago I saw Alyce use a really neat trick that will produce a "Save-As" dialog window but with another window caption. In the case of her example it was the words "Save-As" in another language. She credited Brent Thorn with the code.

I wanted to capture this trick for all of time in the newsletters and upon requesting Brent Thorn was kind enough to allow me to reprint his material.

I am not sure if many of you have visited Brent's excellent LB website, but it is work a visit let me assure you. You can find it on the wed at: [http://members.aol.com/b6sw/index.html]

A "Save As" FileDialog without "Save"

Liberty BASIC 3 and 4 give you the ability to determine which type of file dialog is displayed, Open or Save As. Before LB 3, only the Open dialog was available. The Save As is preferable for saving a file mostly for aesthetic reasons. (Although LB does not, most applications will have the Save As dialog tell the user he/she is about to overwrite an existing file.)

What if you want a Save As dialog, but you want the title to read "Create New File"? To answer this, you need to know that Windows almost always uses C-type null-terminated strings. On the other hand, LB almost never cares which characters are in a string because, as is common in BASIC, LB stores the length with the string itself.

Therefore the trick is to use a null character or Chr$(0) to terminate the text that shows and follow that with the word "Save."

FileDialog "Create New File"+Chr$(0)+"Save", "*.*", file$

More on the subject

Brent later commented to me the following which I pass on to you. This is not tested, but Microsoft document seem to support this.

Although I don't mention it, I believe, based on documentation, that doing something like the following produces Open and Save file dialogs with the titles in the user's native language.

FileDialog "", "*.*", openFile$

FileDialog Chr$(0)+"Save", "*.*", saveFile$